Neuroscientists have developed a new prosthetic system that can improve the recollection of specific memories by hacking the brain’s memory pathways. Although the deep brain technology is not yet capable of reminding you if you’ve turned off the oven, research led by Wake Forest University (WFU) and the University of Southern California (USC) has demonstrated that it can help people recall particular images with greater ease.
While electrical and magnetic brain stimulation have emerged as promising ways to enhance overall cognitive performance, until this recent breakthrough, the idea of a brain ‘zap’ to recollect discrete details was purely fictional.
“Here, we not only highlight an innovative technique for neurostimulation to enhance memory, but we also demonstrate that stimulating memory isn’t just limited to a general approach but can also be applied to specific information that is critical to a person,” explains neuroscientist Brent Roeder from WFU School of Medicine.
The researchers conducted experiments on 14 adults who had epilepsy and were fitted with brain electrodes to locate the origin of their seizures. The team has been working with similar cohorts for years now as the implants provide a platform to study electrical brain stimulation. In 2018, the researchers tested the neural implants by asking participants to create codes of information into the hippocampus – the area of the brain associated with memory. These codes mimicked a pattern of neural activity associated with remembering information.
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Recently, the team used a computer model to monitor a person’s brain activity to identify patterns associated with the memory of specific images. During a visual memory test, the model generated stimulation patterns for each participant, linked to the memorizing of images of animals, buildings, plants, tools, and vehicles.
When those same neural codes were fed back into the hippocampus, the study participants could match previously observed images from memory with greater accuracy. The accuracy rate was initially around 22 percent but improved to almost 38 percent when the researchers stimulated both hemispheres of the brain and focused on participants with impaired memory.
“Our goal is to create an intervention that can restore memory function that’s lost because of Alzheimer’s disease, stroke or head injury,” says Roeder.
“We found the most pronounced change occurred in people who had impaired memory.”
The team of researchers have found that deep brain stimulation has the potential to significantly modify memory. However, there are still multiple challenges that must be overcome before this can be a viable option.
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The researchers are working towards developing ‘static codes’ for individual memories, but this requires further refinement and testing of the model. Even when a code works in boosting memory, it’s unclear what component of an image category those neural patterns are actually encoding. For instance, an image of a house with a tree in it could be intended to have the house as the main focus, but the position of the tree could interfere with this intent. Additionally, focus may differ from person to person and over time.
The researchers plan to continue refining their memory model to figure out how basic information is coded and retrieved in the hippocampus. They also want to investigate whether the memory patterns of one individual can be used to stimulate memory in another. If this is possible, it suggests that the prosthetic memory system is ‘writing’ a memory code into the brain, rather than simply ‘reinforcing’ an existing code.
“Each of these questions will move the research forward to the point of developing a memory prosthetic operating on general features of memory encoding that are common across patients, yet specific enough to facilitate retention of specific memory content,” the team concludes.
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References:
1. Roeder, B. M., She, X., Dakos, A. S., Moore, B., Wicks, R. T., Witcher, M. R., … & Hampson, R. E. (2024). Developing a hippocampal neural prosthetic to facilitate human memory encoding and recall of stimulus features and categories. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 18, 1263311.
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